


The Day We Met

by softjoycebyers



Category: Carol (2015), Ocean's 8 (2018)
Genre: F/F, Found Family, I'm Sorry, Implied Character Death, No spoilers but I think you can guess, and that's a spoiler, it's a little angsty, omg I'm so sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-26 05:48:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20737223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softjoycebyers/pseuds/softjoycebyers
Summary: In what is probably the most ambitious thing I've ever written, Carol and Therese walked so Lou and Debbie could run.Lou meets (one of) her grandmother(s), Therese Belivet and gains catharsis.





	The Day We Met

**Author's Note:**

> I've been toying with this concept for about a year now, and it started out as a wild idea between me and a friend but it didn't get very far. 
> 
> However, recently I felt inspired to revisit this concept again. So here it is in this ambitious but not-so-totally farfetched, quite plausible story. 
> 
> I'm a one person editing machine, all mistakes are mine. Please save your tomato throwing till the end!

She had been relatively easy to find once Lou had decided to look for her. 

With the help of Rubin and Rusty, they were able to track down one Therese Belivet to The Happy Acres Retirement Home. 

Lou was startled from her thoughts when Debbie touched her shoulder, sliding her hand down her arm, intertwining their fingers and giving them a firm squeeze. 

They were standing in front of the homey looking building in Upstate New York. Lou was still working up the courage to go inside. She wasn’t the type to get nervous, but she was unsure how their unannounced visit would be received. Would Therese want to meet her? Did the older woman even know who she was?

For her part, Debbie didn’t try to rush Lou inside, understanding how monumental this moment was for her. Besides Debbie had nowhere else to be and she was perfectly content offering Lou the emotional support she needed. She was the reason they had even made it this far, after all. 

Lou takes a breath, and Debbie leans into her side – waiting for the other woman to meet her eyes as she moves the bangs back from her face. 

“You ready?”

“Not really. But I’ve put this off long enough.”

“Okay,” Debbie motions for Lou to lead the way, and they climb up the front stoop and in through the doors. 

Debbie rings the bell on the front desk as Lou signs their names in the guest book and wait for a nurse to appear. 

It wasn’t long after the lingering sound of the bell disappeared that a sturdy nurse with dark hair, thick rimmed glasses, and a kind smile walked out of the office behind the desk to greet them. 

“Can I help you?”

Lou stammers a bit, suddenly lost for words, “I’m here to see Therese Belivet.”

She pauses a moment before adding, “I’m her granddaughter.” 

The nurse looked at Lou bemusedly, “Oh. I didn’t realize Ms. Belivet had any relatives… Is she expecting you?”

“It’s a little complicated,” Debbie cuts in to help fill the awkward silence. “But no, she’s not expecting us.”

The nurse cocks her head to the side, debating for a moment whether or not to let the two women meet her charge. 

“Alright,” the woman finally decides — the pair didn’t seem to have malicious intent. “I’ll let Ms. Belivet know you’re here.” 

She leads them back to the greater lobby beyond the front entrance and tells the couple to wait. 

“Do you want me to go with you?” Debbie asks Lou after the nurse leaves. 

“No,” Lou sighs. “I’ll be fine. I’ll come get you if she doesn’t kick me out though.”

“She’s not going to kick out,” Debbie gives Lou’s hand another reassuring squeeze. 

“Okay,” the brunette smiles cheekily and then after a beat, “I’m sure I can find a water aerobics class I can sneak into while you’re gone or a Bridge game I can sit in on.”

Lou chuckles, rolling her eyes. 

“You’re not going to swindle these people out of their hard earned money, Deb.”

“No, no! Of course not,” Debbie feigns offense. “I’m not a monster,” she winks. 

Lou laughs again, this time more heartily. 

“Thank you.” 

The nurse interrupts them then, “Ms — ”

“Miller. Lou MIller,” Lou offers. 

“She’ll see you now Ms. Miller,” the nurse smiles. “Ms. Belivet is just down the hall to your left.” 

Lou finally lets go of Debbie’s hand, belatedly realizing just how tight she had been holding on to it. 

The nurse only leads her down a few steps to make sure she finds the right room and then she’s gone. 

Lou had known about Therese and her grandmother for a while. It was something that nagged at her in the back of her mind, but she was never sure if that was one door she wanted to open. 

Before she ran away at 16, Lou broke into the records room of the group home she was in and took her file. There wasn’t much in the original folder she cared to keep except for her birth certificate, a passport she had no recollection of posing for, and a letter from her mother. But, it was two years before she would even read it. Her primary focus was geared more toward survival and putting as much distance between her and Australia as possible. It was only when she was on her one-way flight from Macau to America that she even thought about the letter again. 

Lou stood out of view of Therese; her nerves having multiplied the closer she got to door. From where she stood, she could only see the elderly woman’s profile, lost in thought. Her once sharp angles smoothed out somewhat with age, the deep laugh lines etched in her cheeks, a sign of a life well lived and yet there was a melancholic air surrounding her. 

Suddenly, Therese turns her head in the direction of the door as if she’s knows Lou is standing there, and she freezes as though she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t. 

“Are you just going to stand there all day or come inside?” 

Lou takes a steadying breath, stepping out from out of the shadow. 

“Carol?” Therese exhales softly before she could introduce herself, eyes mirroring Lou’s bewildered expression. 

Lou quicker to recover, wrinkles her nose. 

“Er, no. It’s Lou… isa,” she couldn’t remember the last time she used her full name, it felt foreign on her tongue.

Therese nods, shaking herself from her momentary lapse, her gaze lingering questionably on the blonde by the door. 

“Certainly not with that accent,” she says by way of putting the other woman at ease.

Therese points Lou in the direction of a box on her dresser, and Lou only hesitates a fraction of a second more before moving towards it. 

“You know,” Therese says lowly to her back as Lou looks through the old black and white photos. “When the nurse said my granddaughter came to visit me I thought she was the one who had finally gone senile.”

She pauses, not expecting an answer she continues, “it sounded too good to be true but I had to see you for myself.”

Lou stared down at the photos in stunned silence; in one picture Carol was smiling back at her. The woman was sitting in a diner, chin resting on her hand, she looked tired but happy. 

Therese comes up behind Lou then, leaning on the dresser with her. 

“You actually look so much like her, it’s almost uncanny.” 

Lou absorbs the elder woman’s words, raising her eyebrows at her double in the photo. 

“I never thought I looked like anyone before. I think my ears are a little bigger though,” she tries to joke. 

Therese hums, taking the picture from Lou and tracing Carol’s face with her finger, eyes closed once again lost in thought. 

“We were driving to nowhere in particular,” she sighs. “I’m not sure we ever had a destination but I was happy to take her lead. I was happy to be anywhere with Carol.”

Therese opens her eyes, smiling fondly at the memory, “We sat in this diner in the middle of nowhere, and I took this picture. In the short time I had known her, she’d never looked so peaceful."

Lou looks at the picture once more taking in the sight of Carol, noticing features she’s only ever seen in herself before, and then moving on to the next one. 

In this one Carol and Therese are standing in front of a Christmas tree with a little girl, a crestfallen look on her face that got increasingly harder to hide as she aged. 

“Rindy,” Therese says sadly. “Your mother.” 

Lou brings the photo up closer to eye level. She could barely recall what her mother looked like as an adult -- and she knows she’s never seen her as a child. 

From the little Lou remembers of her mother, which wasn’t much at this point in her life, she knew her mother didn’t like pictures. She had this distinct memory of the social worker asking her if there were any that she wanted to take with her but there were none in the house. 

“She doesn’t look very happy.”

“It was one of the last Christmas’ we had with her. Rindy didn’t want to go home,” a shadow crosses over Therese’s face, her tone is biting, “Harge, your grandfather, always found a reason to keep her with him over the holidays. It hurt Carol to have to let her go.”

“Men seem to be a curse for this family,” Lou observes quietly to herself.

She shakes her head to rid herself of the dark turn her thoughts had taken and changes the subject. 

“Do you know how she died?” 

Lou’s father had found out Rindy had planned to leave him, and in a fit of rage ran them off the road. She had overheard the police tell the Social Worker. 

“Yes, and it was the only thing I ever kept from Carol.” 

“Why?”

“I don’t think she would have survived it.”

The somberness of Therese’s tone chilled her. 

Therese tells Lou about how her and Carol learned of Rindy’s death two years after the fact. The police had told them her next of kin had been harder to find than usual because Rindy had virtually changed everything about herself, renouncing her American identity. 

“Did they tell you about me?” 

Therese was now back in her chair, having been standing too long, and Lou sat cross legged at her feet. 

“We tried to adopt you – ” Lou opens her mouth to speak but Therese continues before the cogwheels could fully turn in her head, “ –or I should say, Carol did. I had no legal claim to you but Social Services said she was too old.” 

“I’m sorry,” she wasn’t sure what she was apologizing for but in her all her years, she’s never felt smaller. 

Therese shook her head vehemently, “You needn’t apologize. What for? You were a child. Time just wasn’t on our side.”

“You have nothing to apologize for,” Therese repeats sternly. “We would have moved heaven and earth to get you, if we could have.”

Lou was still grappling with her feelings of abandonment. While she knew her mother hadn’t left her by choice, in the moments she was honest with herself she realized – and no matter how hard the woman tried – she had checked out of her life long before she was taken from it. 

But she didn’t blame her mother as much as she felt sorry for her; for them. 

She had been used to being alone for a long time before she met Debbie but then she had left her too. And even though they had found their way back, and she knew Debbie wasn’t going anywhere, it was a feeling she didn’t think would ever fully go away. 

But learning that her grandmothers had wanted her gave her a different sense of belonging she hadn’t realized she needed. 

“I had accepted that I might actually die without meeting you,” Therese says, breaking through her thoughts.

Lou hangs her head, only realizing then that she had been crying. 

“I’m sorry,” this time though she knows she’s apologizing for taking so long to find them. 

It had been a lot of information for her to process at 19, and she didn’t know what to do with it. When she touched down in New York, survival had once again taken precedence, and then she met Debbie and that changed her life in ways she didn’t expect. 

Lou hadn’t meant to take 20 years to find them. 

Rindy had written nearly four pages explaining why she had run away from America, Lou wasn’t sure if her mother had truly intended for it to be read but it was addressed to her and it was packed along with Lou’s things. 

In it Rindy wrote about growing tired of Harge’s control, how he’d twist everything Carol said or did. But she also wrote about how she didn’t feel like she could go to her mother because in their last meeting she had said things she didn’t know how to take back. 

In retrospect, she wrote, and it was only after Lou was born, did Rindy understand that Carol hadn’t chosen Therese over her. Carol had simply chosen to be happy. The consequence of that, however unfair, was losing her daughter. Rindy wrote about working to get her head out of her ass to call her mother – and this is the part that made Lou cry – to tell her about this newfound understanding, to apologize for how cruel time was to them even though it wasn’t their fault, to tell her she’d missed her every day, and that Aunt Abby was right, daddy is an asshole. Rindy had hoped to gain the courage Carol had to take her daughter and finally leave her husband. 

It broke Lou’s heart to know Rindy never got the chance to do any of that. 

“What made you decide to come and see me?” 

“My fiancé,” Lou perks up, sniffling. “She found mum’s letter.”

Lou tells Therese about Debbie, conveniently leaving out certain details of their lives that were less than legal. She tells her about how Debbie had been helping her look for her birth certificate to file for their marriage license when she came across the manilla envelope in a box of old records. How it got there, Lou didn’t know but she can still hear Debbie’s rant on how she shouldn’t be so careless with important documents. 

“Sounds like quite a girl,” Therese laughs. 

“Yeah,” Lou smiles dazedly. 

Lou and Therese lose track of time after that, swapping stories about each other’s lives, not quite making up for the time they lost in the past but trying to fit in as much as they could in the present. 

The pair is interrupted by a knock at the door, and both women turn and look up to find a sheepish looking Debbie. 

“Sorry to interrupt,” Debbie says. “The nurse said I could come back here. I think she felt bad I was sitting out there alone so long.”

Debbie takes in the sight of Lou’s red-rimmed eyes and softens, silently asking her she’s okay. 

At her nod, Debbie goes to sit next to her, grabbing her hand and hugging it to her. 

“This is Debbie,” Lou beams at Therese. 

“Hi,” Debbie smiles, extending her other hand for the older woman to take.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! 
> 
> I haven't written anything since April, so please be kind and drop me a line to tell me what you think I could always use some encouragement and your words feed me (:


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